There is nothing wrong with emotional eating! Our society that fears weight gain says it’s bad because emotional eating can lead to weight gain if done too often. But eating emotionally is actually a pretty useful coping strategy for many people. I was, exactly as this post states, […]

A part of intuitive eating is finding satisfaction in the foods you eat. You will eventually get to a place where you may be satisfied with less of certain foods than you used to. And you may turn away foods that aren’t up to your standards. But this isn’t about dieting and finding the miracle cure to eating less. It’s not about being able to say no to foods that aren’t “worth the calories”. It’s about being attuned with your body and knowing what it’s needing. When we talk about food being “worth the calories”, we assume that we have some sort of calorie limit. We assume that we can’t trust our body to regulate itself and we assume that the only reason we eat is for nourishment vs pleasure. Also, every meal is not going to be perfect. Sometimes we need the energy and calories from food and we eat a meal that is less than pleasurable but will give us the nutrition we need to get through the day.

The bread basket is a source of stress for many people. Some people feel out of control when there’s a basket of bread in front of them while they’re hungry for a meal. A popular diet tip is to ask the waiter to not bring out the bread or tortilla chips or pita so there’s no temptation to eat them. And if that’s where you’re at, no shame there. But the problem was that the waiter made judgments about us based on our food choices and labeled us “good” and labeled the bread “bad”, so now we were being “bad” for eating the bread.